tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Tue Aug 22 15:32:41 1995

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Re: }} Sender: [email protected]



>From: [email protected]
>Date: Tue, 22 Aug 1995 09:52:15 -0500

>   'a ghorlaHqu' tera'ngan be', vavoy!

>I also thought of  ghorrup , but that would suggest that Terran 
>women are ready to break (themselves), as an intentional action, 
>which is not the idea you want.

>I'm assuming that the gloss of ghor, "break", is intransitive (as 
>in "the captive's fingers break") rather than transitive (as in "I 
>break the captive's fingers").  I hope I haven't overlooked any 
>canon that contradicts this assumption, because if  ghor  means 
>intransitive-"break" we can easily express transitive-"break" with 
>the causative suffix: 

Transitivity is a known problem with Klingon; we simply don't know enough
about which words are transitive and which intransivitve from the one-word
English glosses (English is not very careful about transitivity).

>-- but there's no convenient way to do the reverse if  ghor  
>means transitive-"break".

I had taken "ghor" to be transitive in Jonah, and translated what in Hebrew
means "And the ship was thought to be going-to-be-broken" as "'ej Duj
ghorlu' net pIH".  Who can say which is right?

~mark



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